Riders of the Dawn

Early in Louis L'Amour's career, he wrote a number of novel-length stories for "pulp" western magazines. "I lived with my characters so closely that their lives were still as much a part of me as I was of them long after the issues in which they appeared went out of print, " he said. "I wanted to tell the reader more about my people and why they did what they did." So he revised and expanded these magazine works to be published again as full-length novels. Here is one of these early creations that have long been a source of great speculation and curiosity among his fans. In Riders of the Dawn, a young gunslinger is changed for the better by a meeting with a beautiful woman. A classic range-war western, this novel features that powerful, romantic, strangely compelling vision of the American West for which L'Amour's fiction is known. In the author's words: "It was a land where nothing was small, nothing was simple. Everything, the lives of men and the stories they told, ran to extremes."